I've been working on this game off and on since I first got Brackeen's book Developing Games in Java. I built a couple simpler platformers but this one has a lot more features. It's an overhead game where you are an AI entity living inside the giant network of world wide computer systems. The actual content is very sparse but there is a simple plot and objective. You can talk to NPC, pick up items, buy/sell and interact with objects.

Basically, you have to rescue someone.

There are definitely bugs that I need to fix (and lots and lots of fleshing out) but let me know how it works on various systems. I've tested on an Intel iMac and G4 Powerbook. Seems to run well. It's built on Java 1.4.

It's been a lot of fun and yes, I'll be happy to share the source code. Although, it is a serious mess because I would work on it for a few weeks and then stop for a couple months.

I'll give more tips later if people want but my first suggestions are to read the help screen (h) and interact with any inventory items you pick up.

You can find a single jar download along with larger versions of the screenshots at

It works fine under Linux but I need to click once on the screen to allow the game to listen to the whole keys. Could you call the method requestFocus() or requestFocusInWindow please? I can go through a few walls sometimes and it is impossible to come back. The frame rate is between 20 and 31 FPS. Good luck and keep it up. Using Java Webstart is an excellent idea

There are larger screenshots at the link above but here's a cropped closeup of the vendor interaction.

The list on the left is what the vendor has to sell, the list on the right is the player inventory window. The player is the eye in the gear graphic under the first Dr X lab key. There should only be one but there's a bug where the npc gives you two of them.

It works fine under Linux but I need to click once on the screen to allow the game to listen to the whole keys. Could you call the method requestFocus() or requestFocusInWindow please? I can go through a few walls sometimes and it is impossible to come back. The frame rate is between 20 and 31 FPS. Good luck and keep it up. Using Java Webstart is an excellent idea

I'll try to get the focus call in 0.2.7.

Yeah, the collision detection bugs out occasionally and pops you through a wall. It's on my list but may be awhile before I get around to it.

20-31 fps is what I get on my G4 powerbook and it seems to play well. My iMac varies a lot more: 26-51.

Hm it was sort of difficult to test out because I couldn't successfully play for longer than 1 minute at a time before a bug made me quit. Also the controls (in terms of talking and whatnot) are sort of unintuitive.

A couple bugs:1) I managed to walk through a wall somehow and after I did so I began moving in reverse direction at double speed, until I moved off the screen and couldn't get back.2) I pressed I believe the A key and some exception came up, but before I could see what it was the JNLP window closed.3) The JNLP downloads the resources every single time I open it. Are you disabling caching?

Hm it was sort of difficult to test out because I couldn't successfully play for longer than 1 minute at a time before a bug made me quit. Also the controls (in terms of talking and whatnot) are sort of unintuitive.

A couple bugs:1) I managed to walk through a wall somehow and after I did so I began moving in reverse direction at double speed, until I moved off the screen and couldn't get back.2) I pressed I believe the A key and some exception came up, but before I could see what it was the JNLP window closed.3) The JNLP downloads the resources every single time I open it. Are you disabling caching?

Re: dialogue interaction, the top box is what the npc said and the lower box contains up to three responses for you to choose from. Left click a selection to respond. Pretty much all interactions are single left-clicks.

1) yep collision detection bug.2) congratulations, you found a bug I didn't know about. It was from an incomplete combat system that I had not cleaned up. A and B were going to be different kinds of attacks. I'll disable the input check for those.3) yeah, i noticed that too. I don't think it used to do that but my jnlp file is based on an old file. I'll have to look at the spec and see if I can figure out what's going on. I have offline-allowed so I'm not sure what's causing that.

Sorry you haven't had much luck but I do appreciate what feedback you've been able to give me. It's been helpful.

I fixed the webstart link. Apparently this attribute in the j2se tag was causing the problem "initial-heap-size="32m". That was incorrect. The server is stamping files six hours in the future. So webstart thinks there are newer versions of the files.

I fixed the crash when typing a or b keys and when selecting an empty dialogue response.

This is neat! Very unorthodox However I have found a few things that bother me a little:

1. The music loop is a little too short. It is nice, but too short and after a while it starts to be annoying.2. The description of "products", that I can buy is too dark (at least for me). It is barely visible. 3. When I approach those machines that sell things, I have to hit them a couple of times before the dialogue window appears. Sometimes it appears just for a fraction of a second and then I have to move back and approach the NPC again.4. This is just my personal preference, but I prefer a windowed application to have a frame, so that I can move it around.

I've run the game on Fedora 9.0 (32bit) running on AMD AthlonX2 2100MHz. The FPS was at around 30.

This is neat! Very unorthodox However I have found a few things that bother me a little:

1. The music loop is a little too short. It is nice, but too short and after a while it starts to be annoying.2. The description of "products", that I can buy is too dark (at least for me). It is barely visible. 3. When I approach those machines that sell things, I have to hit them a couple of times before the dialogue window appears. Sometimes it appears just for a fraction of a second and then I have to move back and approach the NPC again.4. This is just my personal preference, but I prefer a windowed application to have a frame, so that I can move it around.

I've run the game on Fedora 9.0 (32bit) running on AMD AthlonX2 2100MHz. The FPS was at around 30.

Version 0.2.9 is available from the webstart link.

1. I turned music off by default. It was just something i made in GarageBand and threw in. I also added a toggle "m" to turn it off/on.2. I adjusted the contrast. It's easier to read now.3. Yeah, more collision detection weirdness I have to look in to.4. I'd like to make a windowed version too, mostly to help debugging, but right now the code is prety tightly coupled to full screen. Not sure when I might get around to it though.